I have written a few times on my deliberations on what gear to take for an Arctic photography expedition. Despite the reduction in weight of photography gear since the change to mirrorless systems it is still a juggle to carry what you need within the airline weight limits. Camera bodies were the Nikon Z9 and Nikon Z8 for essentially equivalent capability and redundancy. I wanted lenses to be able to cover wide angle for landscapes through to extreme telephoto for birds and settled on taking the Nikkor Z 14-30mm f4 S, Nikkor Z 24-200mm f4-6.3 VR, Nikkor Z 100-400mm f4.5-5.6 VR S and Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S with a 1.4x teleconverter. All got used and none were superfluous.

I had been tempted to just take the Nikkor Z 24-200mm f4-6.3 VR with the Nikkor Z 180-600mm f5.6-6.3 VR as that combo would have covered a lot but knew that I would regret not having the Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S as my prime focus was always going to be the birds. I had read one article that suggested 800mm was too long for the Arctic but really cannot reconcile this with my experience. The reach was often really useful but thermal distortion (hard to call it “heat haze” in the Arctic) makes long telephoto lenses difficult at times.

My go to set up was the Nikon Z9 with Nikkor Z 800mm f6.3 VR S on a sling at my left side and the Z8 with the 100-400 or 24-200 around my neck and I could switch between the 2 rigs seamlessly. The 28-400mm would be a strong contender to replace the 24-200 and 100-400 but I was not satisfied with it for flying birds in low light on the tests I had done.

I have long used OpTech straps and have adapted a Pro strap to use as a sling with a RRS swivel QD attachment to my Nikkor Z 800mm f56.3 VR S with the replacement LeoFoto NF-06 lens foot. On my Z8 with shorter lenses I just use an OpTech Super Classic strap over my neck. I was tempted by the OpTech dual harness but it seems more like an item of clothing to get into and out of and I prefer the simplicity of 2 straps that I can choose one or the other or both easily.

The only filters I took and used were circular polarisers for the two wide-angle lenses. These are very useful for cutting reflections from the sea to highlight ice floes in landscape images.

An important point to make is that my iPhone 14 Pro was an integral part of my photography set-up and at times the best camera for the task. The following table gives a breakdown of the number of images with each lens combo. A bit skewed because a lot of pan blur work was done with the 800m on the Nikon Z9

Charging was accomplished with a couple of GaN PD high power USB chargers. I could attach my Nikon Z9 MH-33 charger via USB-C cable and my Nitecore UNK2 via USB-A PD. I have 2 Nikon EN-EL18d batteries for my Z9 so could charge one while still using the camera with the other. I had 3 batteries for the Z8 and could double 2 on the Nitecore charger while using one in camera but only ever needed to charge one at a time. These USB chargers would also charge my MacBook Pro via USB-C PD so I didn’t take a specific laptop charger.

In terms of memory cards, I carried 6x 512GB CF-Express B cards for my Z9 and a 1TB CF-Express B and 512GB SD card in my Nikon Z8 which were more than sufficient.

I covered my camera bag strategy in a previous post.

A laptop is an essential piece of photography gear and my MacBook M1 Pro 16 continues to do the job well. I use Samsung portable SSD drives to download to and carried 5x2TB and 1x4TB drives to download and back-up to. I didn’t need to clear any memory cards so always had 3 copies of files once downloaded and backed-up. There was little time to do any editing so download and back-up was largely all that was done on the trip. I am now working through folders of images on my return home. I carried my laptop in a Thule Gauntlet bag which is compact and tough. While not as spacious as my usual Think Tank My 2nd Brain, it is well within airline size limits so attracts no attention and accommodates my drives and cables as well as iPad easily.

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